


wrapped up in you

by nothingunrealistic



Category: Billions (TV)
Genre: (for Rian and Winston), (for Taylor and Winston), Autistic Winston (Billions), Character Study, F/M, Other, Post-Relationship, Pre-Relationship, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:33:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27929068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingunrealistic/pseuds/nothingunrealistic
Summary: Rian and Winston try to figure each other out. (Taylor helps.)
Relationships: Rian/Winston (Billions), Taylor Mason & Rian, Taylor Mason/Winston
Comments: 13
Kudos: 14





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The first chapter of this was written in response to a Tumblr prompt; the second chapter was inspired by fanart. Both are linked at the end of their respective chapters.

Renovations have been going on all week at Axe Capital, and the noise is really ruining the ambience of the office. Luckily for Rian, none of the construction work is happening inside the Mase Carb enclave, but glass walls don’t block out all the sound, just muffle it.

With everyone trying to make up the losses from the Shine-Lucence collapse, it’s been a week of late nights for the quant team. She’d expect the construction crew to have gone home by now, but they’re still in the building, and the constant clamor of saw and hammer still seeps through the glass. Maybe they don’t have a union.

Rian hits the button on another backtest and leans back in her chair. That should give her an hour at least to look into another project, or maybe just to relax. 

She glances over to Winston, thinking of asking what he’s working on, but he doesn’t look like he’s working at all. Though technically he’s looking at his Bloomberg, or at least pointing his face toward it, his eyes are glazed over. His hands aren’t on his keyboard or mouse; one of them is clicking a pen every few seconds.

Rian pauses her music and takes off her headphones. Normally that would catch Winston’s attention, but he doesn’t look her way. She needs to be more obvious.

“¿Estás pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo?”

Winston’s eyes flick over to her, more focused now, giving her a half-hearted attempt at a death glare. He still doesn’t say anything.

“You’re really spacing out right now,” Rian says. “Like, you might as well be in the Oort cloud.” Oh, that’s a good metaphor, very fund-appropriate. She’d better keep that one in her back pocket.

The silent semi-glare lasts several more seconds before Winston speaks. “Long week. I’m tired.”

A hammer bangs against metal somewhere on the main floor, and Winston flinches, eyes flickering shut, fingers curling tighter around the pen. That doesn’t look like ordinary exhaustion.

“Construction getting to you?” Rian says, trying to be casual. Sounding too concerned would make it weird. “I can’t believe they’re still here.”

“Yeah. Can’t block it out, can’t focus.”

“Don’t you have headphones?”

“Broke last week. New pair hasn’t shipped yet.”

The muted clunk of the office door opening turns both Rian’s and Winston’s heads. Mafee’s walked in, and pushed the door so far open that it’s locked into place, letting the sounds of power tools flow in unfiltered. “You guys are still here?”

“Fuck off,” Winston says. A few analysts stare, but Mafee ignores him.

“You’re also still here,” Rian points out.

“Everyone on the trading floor’s gone home. Didn’t expect there to be anyone left here.”

Winston drops his pen onto the desk. “Shut the door, asshole.” 

“Deal with it,” Mafee says.

“Do you know what the renovations are for?” Rian says, as Winston pulls off his glasses and buries his face in his hands. “Or why they’re continuing this late?”

“No clue.” Mafee yanks out an empty desk chair and drops into it with a clatter. “Back in the Westport office, Axe had the meditation room torn up and redone into a panic room. Maybe he’s doing that again.”

“What for?”

“Who knows? It’s Axe, no one has a fucking clue why he does anything until six months later.” A drill whines and buzzes outside; Mafee raises his voice. “I mean, when he was renovating the first time, he was crazy paranoid about there being a quisling in the office, and then in three weeks it was like he’d totally forgotten about it — whoa, hey, man —”

Rian follows his gaze to Winston, who’s pressing his open hands against his face again and again, so hard that it has to hurt. Red scratches run from his hairline down over his forehead. Mafee jumps from his chair and tries to pull Winston’s hands away from his face. “Dude, you’re gonna hurt yourself, don’t do that —” 

“Don’t fucking touch me,” Winston grits out, barely intelligible, struggling to yank his hands free of Mafee’s grip.

“Help me out here,” Mafee says, turning back to Rian, but she’s never seen this happen, has no idea what to do. 

Who would know?

Lauren and Wendy are nowhere in sight. Most of the other quants have gone home, and the few left, whose names Rian doesn’t know anyway, are pointedly ignoring events at Winston’s end of the desk. Taylor —

Taylor’s still here, in their office. Taylor knows how to handle problems, how to make things better.

“I’m going to get Taylor,” Rian announces, and gets up from her chair.

On her way, one analyst she passes dares to ask, “What’s going —”

“None of your business,” Rian says, because it seems fitting, and sounds a lot better than  _ I don’t know either and I’m scared. _

She slips into Taylor’s office. With their laptop open and the desk phone pressed to their ear, they don’t notice her even when the door shuts behind her. This might be a bad time.

“Hey, are you busy?”

“Excuse me for a moment,” Taylor says into the phone, before setting it on the desk. “Yes. Is this urgent?”

“Well, Winston’s kind of freaking out, and Mafee and I don’t know what to do,” Rian says, “so… yeah?”

Taylor looks toward Winston, and their brow furrows over widening eyes. They pick up the phone just long enough to say, “I’m sorry, but I’ll need to call you back another day,” before hanging up and slamming the laptop shut. In less time than it took Rian to decide to ask Taylor for help, they’re out the door; she follows them.

“Please go home and close the door behind you,” she hears them say to the remaining quants, who hurry to shut off their computers and pack up their things. When they get to Winston, they wave away Mafee — he’s gotten the message to get his hands off Winston, it seems, and was just entreating him to calm down instead. (It isn’t working.) No reason why Rian’s presence would be any more helpful; she retreats to the couch near the office entrance, the door finally swinging shut behind the last analyst to leave. 

Taylor sits in Rian’s chair, leaning in close to Winston and talking too quietly to hear from across the room. That doesn’t stop Rian from trying, and she’s straining so hard to pick out their words that it’s almost a surprise when Mafee sits down next to her. “Do you think he’s having a stroke or something?”

“I think if he were having a stroke, Taylor would have called 911 instead of handling it themself.” Rian shifts on the couch. Mafee’s sitting partly on her cushion and partly on the one next to it, and it’s throwing off her equilibrium. “You haven’t seen this before?”

“Never.”

Relative quiet settles over the office — the racket from outside is muffled again, and inside there’s only Taylor’s voice, low and calm, and Winston’s breathing, slowing.

Both of them get up, and Winston follows Taylor to their office. Through the glass, Rian watches him collapsing onto the couch just inside the door and Taylor pulling down the window shades. Seems like it’d be helpful if the glass walls on three sides also had shades. Maybe this would have been avoided if they were in a normal building.

Winston described it to her, once, the building that Taylor Mason Carbon had called home when it was named Taylor Mason Capital and not under Axe’s control. An old warehouse, refurbished, across the river in Dumbo. Exposed wood and stone and solid doors, low light and quiet, rather than Axe Cap’s glass and chrome and glaring fluorescents and soaring staircases that declare  _ the future is here and now and it is insane wealth. _ He’d obviously missed it, and she can see why.

On the other side of the glass, Taylor sits down beside Winston, shoulder to shoulder, their backs to everyone else, and Rian aches.

“I think maybe we should leave,” Mafee says.

“We should.”

Rian pushes herself off the couch to return to her desk. The backtest will have to finish another day. She turns off her Bloomberg, scoops up her laptop and headphones, and doesn’t let her focus linger on Winston’s glasses, askew on his keyboard.

When she turns for the door, Taylor is there, and Rian almost jumps. It’s spooky how quietly they move sometimes. “Before you go, I need to speak with you. And Mafee.”

“Sure.”

A nod from Taylor summons Mafee from the couch. He comes over demanding to know, in a not-quite-whisper, “What the hell was that about?”

“Winston will be taking a few days off.”

“Because he gave himself a concussion and said ‘don’t fucking touch me’ when I tried to stop him?”

“In a case like that, I would suggest that you not fucking touch him.” Taylor shoves their hands in their pockets. “It likely exacerbated the situation.”

“There wasn’t a situation until he tried to tear his face off.”

“There kind of was,” Rian says. “Before you came in, he said he was tired and the noise from the construction was bothering him. And you leaving the door open probably didn’t help.”

“Exactly. Being subjected to noise at that volume for this long can be… overstimulating.” Rian steals a glance toward Winston, who’s now lying down on the couch. “Some people are more sensitive to that kind of disruption than others.”

“Winston? Sensitive?”

So the pot is calling the kettle callous now? “Unlike you.”

Mafee shrugs, hands falling open helplessly. “It’s not like I wanted him to suffer or something. I didn’t know he wasn’t just being a jackass about me leaving the door open.”

“Anyway,” Taylor says, curt. “Winston will be out next week. I’ll see what can be done about the renovations before he returns —”

“But he’s going to be fine, right?”

Surprised looks from both Mafee and Taylor land on her like laser sights. Damn. She sounded too concerned and she’s made it weird.

“Yes.” There’s no impatience in Taylor’s tone now, just sympathy. “He will be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Original prompt / post [here.](https://nothingunrealistic.tumblr.com/post/635436639410421760/promptrequest-winston-has-been-super-burned-out)
> 
> ETA: There's now fanart of this chapter as well! [Go check it out!](https://unproduciblesmackdown.tumblr.com/post/638486442260283392/fanart-of-sophs-fic-wrapped-up-in-you-which)


	2. Chapter 2

Winston’s only partly surprised when he opens his front door to find an Amazon box he didn’t order sitting in the hallway.

What surprise he does feel stems from not knowing it was going to show up on this particular day or at this hour. Not that the timing really matters — this is the closest he’s come to leaving his apartment all week; there’s no way he would have missed the delivery. And the package itself doesn’t come as a shock because Taylor, after swearing up and down that he could let his week off be a true break and not worry about checking his work email or keeping up with market news or doing anything other than resting and relaxing, had texted him a few days ago:

**_Rian would like to send something to you. Would you object to me giving her your mailing address?_ **

On reading that (the first message of any kind he’d opened in days), Winston had blinked a few times in confusion, because  _ what, _ and responded:

_ What is it _

**_She asked that I not tell you. I believe she wants it to be a surprise._ **

**_She did tell me what she plans to send, and I wouldn’t be raising the question if I thought that you wouldn’t appreciate it, or that she was being dishonest._ **

Good to know that Taylor wouldn’t let Rian send him a box full of glitter and dog shit, unless Rian did a great job of hiding her intentions to send him a box full of glitter and dog shit. He’d only had one question after that.

_ Why is she giving me something _

He hadn’t expected a real answer, but Taylor had spent about five minutes typing one.

**_Rian was, and has been, concerned about your wellbeing. This is her way of showing it._ **

That had made sense, kind of. Mostly because he’d remembered a story Taylor had told him maybe a year and a half ago, about how in their early days at Axe Cap they’d once been worried that Mafee was completely bombing at work, or else coming close to it, and had been advised (they never said by who) to buy him something as a show of support. They’d shelled out for a signed wrestling poster, from the time that the Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell in a Cell, and left it at his desk, and he’d apparently stepped it up after that. Inordinately expensive gifts as a love language.

Of course, thinking in those terms about receiving a mystery item from the coworker he’s been nursing weird fuzzy feelings toward for some weeks now, in the wake of melting down very publicly and embarrassingly right in front of her at work, had made Winston feel floaty and lightheaded — and that was without even factoring in the whole thing being mediated by his boss who he’s been having even more weird and complicated feelings toward for ages now, because God, he can only try to pick apart what so many words and choices mean before he wears himself out. So he’d resolved to finish that text conversation and not think about it any more and just wait for his ostensibly unexpected gift to show up.

_ Okay you can tell her. And also tell her I said thanks _

**_I’ll do both._ **

**_I also hope you’re doing well._ **

_ Could be better but I’m getting there _

**_That’s good to hear._ **

Again: feelings way too complicated to unravel in the moment.

(Taylor had told him that story about the wrestling poster while he was halfway asleep in their bed. On the last day he was at work, they’d offered, in the quiet of their office, to replace his broken headphones.)

And just as intended, he’d gone back to his new schedule of sleeping half the day in four- and six-hour chunks and eating whenever he felt like it and talking to no one, right up until he’d heard a knock on his door and found a cardboard box outside. Which is to say, now.

Winston goes to pick up the box and fails. It’s heavier than he was expecting. (He doesn’t even know what he  _ was _ expecting, but it wasn’t that.) He recalibrates, manages to get it off the ground on his second try, and lugs it into his apartment, pushing the door shut behind him with one foot. 

Most of his waking hours recently have been spent on the couch in his living room, so the box ends up there too, dropped onto the cushion next to where he sits. For a few minutes he doesn’t do much of anything but sit and vaguely contemplate the strangeness of being in his apartment in the middle of the day on a… Thursday? He thinks it’s Thursday — with this box next to him. Then he actually looks at the box, which reveals nothing about its contents, and starts picking at the packing tape. It might be easier to open it with scissors or a knife or something else sharper than his fingernails, but that would require getting up and looking for the sharp thing in question, which would be much harder than staying right here and scraping away.

The last strip of tape peels off, and the flaps of the box fall open. The first thing he sees inside is the packing slip, which he takes out and tosses aside, followed by the crumpled brown paper that’s stuffed in around the actual contents to fill up the box. What’s left after that is dark blue and soft-looking and enveloped in a plastic case that helpfully informs him it contains a Premium Weighted Blanket with Micro-Fleece Duvet, fifteen pounds.

On some level, he wonders if he should be offended by getting this as an unsolicited gift. (He has  _ one _ meltdown in the office and now a weighted blanket has been sent to his door — why not toss in a puzzle piece bumper sticker?) But it’s a nice gesture, or at least nicely meant, and it looks like a pretty expensive blanket, and he isn’t  _ not _ interested in trying it out. (At his last dental appointment, the hygienist had forgotten to take the lead vest off of him after his X-rays were finished, and that was the most pleasant… well, the least unpleasant dental checkup he’s ever had.)

He picks up the packing slip from the floor, reading it this time. The price is nowhere to be found, but there’s a message from Rian.

_ Hope you like blue. _

He does like blue. Blue’s a great color. Maybe his favorite color.

Winston unzips the case without taking it out of the box and places a cautious hand on the exposed square of blanket, sliding slowly. So that’s what micro-fleece feels like. Not quite velvet, not quite fur, but plush and smooth under his fingers.

He’s not sure how long he sits there before realizing he’s been mindlessly stroking the blanket the entire time, but he’d guess at least a solid five minutes. That’s settled — he has to see how this actually feels on top of him.

The blanket’s a pain to get out of the case, wedged in there as tightly as it is, and once it’s out, it’s as heavy as ever and no easier to handle. Winston shoves away the box and plastic case and tries to lay the blanket out along the couch, but it’s so much wider than the cushions that the extra weight hanging over the edge sends the whole thing slithering onto the floor. He bundles the blanket into his arms with some difficulty and resigns himself to having to haul it into his bedroom. 

By some miracle, Winston’s bed is already close enough to being made (that is, the sheet and blanket are still on the bed, and covering it, mostly) that when he gets there, he can lie right down, pull the blanket over himself, and struggle to straighten it out until his arms get tired. When he decides he’s done a good enough job, he relaxes, letting his head hit the pillow and properly feeling the weight of the blanket on the rest of him, and holy  _ shit _ is it comfortable.

Really, “comfortable” is an understatement. The blanket molds itself to every inch of him, putting that lead vest to shame. It’s the same kind of soothing he’d just brushed up against on the coldest New York winter nights, piling blankets up to keep the chill out and finding that he drifted off without looking at his alarm clock once. It’s like being held, perfectly tight, without hesitation.

No wonder that, before he can act on the hazy thought of  _ I should text Rian to thank her myself, _ he’s asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The art that inspired this can be found [here.](https://unproduciblesmackdown.tumblr.com/post/635734128767139841/the-content-winston-quant-billions-ft-weighted)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! You can find me on Tumblr @nothingunrealistic.


End file.
